you hear me, Zuwayy?' Patrick asked. Zuwayy was trembling so hard that Patrick thought he might be having a seizure. 'Answer me, you coward! Can you hear me?'
'Yes… yes, I can hear you,' Zuwayy cried. 'Don't kill me, please, don't kill me!'
'You have one chance to live, Zuwayy,' Patrick said in Arabic. 'You captured some prisoners off some vessels your military forces sank….'
'I know nothing of this! What are you accusing me of? This is not-'
Patrick silenced him with another shot of electricity. 'Be quiet, Zuwayy. There is no doubt that your forces attacked those vessels-the only question now is whether or not you will die for doing so.'
'Do not kill me! Do not kill me!' Zuwayy bleated. 'What do you want? Tell me!'
'You will turn them over to the Egyptians immediately,' Patrick said. 'If they are not delivered within twelve hours, I will hunt you down and execute you before the entire world. And if any of them are harmed in any way, I will find you and crush you like an insect.' The stranger hammered the desk in the rectory with a gloved fist, and the heavy cedar-and-burl desktop smashed into pieces as if a wrecking ball was dropped on it. 'I will burn your houses, destroy your bunkers, tap into your computer systems, and wipe out everything you own. Twelve hours. I'll be waiting. If they are not returned, you die.' To punctuate his order, Patrick reached down, took Zuwayy's nose between two fingers, and crushed it. Blood spurted everywhere, and Zuwayy howled in pain. The figure departed through the door to the mosque itself.
Moments later, Mekkawi returned through the secret tunnel entrance, his side arm in his hands, followed by three heavily armed soldiers. 'Highness, there have been more attacks. I have relayed your orders-' He stopped in sheer horror when he saw Zuwayy lying on the floor, his hair burnt off, blood covering his face and chest. 'My God, what happened?' He was going to call for the outside guards, but then he saw them, lying on the ground, still twitching from the voltage discharging through their bodies.
'Find out… find out…'
'Find out what, Highness?'
'Find out where the prisoners that were captured off the vessels sunk in the Mediterranean are,' Zuwayy gasped, blood flowing from his mouth and shattered nose. 'Find them all, alive or dead; round them up, and get them ready to move out of the country. Truck them… no, bus them… no, fly them… oh hell, just get them out of my country immediately! I don't want one hair on their heads touched. Contact that peacock Khan in Egypt and tell him to get ready to pick up those prisoners.'
'Prisoners? Khan? Who did this to you, sir…?'
'Just do it,' Zuwayy cried, spitting blood. Mekkawi helped him up. 'Do it now!' Zuwayy found a liquor bottle, poured, and downed a glass, his hands shaking uncontrollably.
'What in hell is going on out there, Zuwayy?' Pavel Kazakov asked angrily on the secure phone. This time, Kazakov put the call on the speakerphone, so his aide Ivana Vasilyeva could hear how the great 'king' of Libya bleated and whined like a sheep being led to slaughter. Kazakov knew how Vasilyeva, a former commando and trained intelligence officer in the Russian army, hated weak menJadallah Zuwayy, the man who claimed to be a descendant of Arab kings, would infuriate her. 'Why are you calling me now?'
'Hey, Kazakov, this was your idea to begin with!' Jadallah Zuwayy retorted. 'This is your fault!'
'My fault?'
'It was your suggestion to retaliate against the commandos that attacked Samah,' Zuwayy said. 'That's what I did.
They somehow found out where I was, broke into my sanctuary, and threatened to kill me! He smashed my nose! He threatened to kill me, my entire family, break into my computers, and destroy my military bases.'
'They sound like extremely powerful, efficient, and well-informed commandos,' Kazakov commented dryly. I could use an entire battalion of them, he said to himself. Something that Zuwayy said nagged at his brain… 'Or your soldiers need more security training.'
'How could he have found out where I was? That information is top secret!'
'Zuwayy, the entire world knows about your pleasure palace in Jaghbub,' Kazakov said. 'They know that it is the entrance to your escape route if there is ever a coup against you; they know it is where you bring young girls for whatever perverted pleasure you get out of screwing children. Besides, Jaghbub is less than forty kilometers from the Egyptian border-any good special-operations team can get in and out of the area in there hours. You ought to try a security back-trace on yourself some time, Zuwayy-you might be surprised to learn some of the things anyone can find out about you if they tried.'
'This is outrageous!'
'Just shut up, Zuwayy,' Kazakov said. 'Nothing has changed. You should have just killed all those captives, then set a trap for those commandos when they returned to finish you off. You should have never turned them over to the Egyptians. At least you had the brains to turn them over to Khan and not to Salaam.'
'That commando said he was going to kill me if I didn't turn them over to the Egyptians,' Zuwayy said. 'He got into the sanctuary so easy, I didn't-'
'Hold it,' Kazakov interrupted him. 'You said, 'that commando.' Do you mean to say there was only one commando?'
'I told you there was only one!'
'But you said a minefield and your military base were also hit.'
'They were, but only one commando got into my sanctuary,' Zuwayy said. 'He neutralized the guards and was waiting for me when I-'
'He 'neutralized' the guards? How? Did he kill them?'
'No. He had no weapons-he didn't even touch them.'
Kazakov nearly choked on the cognac he was sipping. He rose slowly to his feet, his throat suddenly dry, his ears ringing. It couldn't be, he thought wildly. No, it couldn't be… I
'Did you hear me, Kazakov?'
'This commando-he was wearing a black outfit, a full helmet with large eyeholes, and a slim backpack? Did he paralyze you with an electric shock that traveled from electrodes on his shoulders to you, without projectiles or wires?'
'Yes! How did you know?'
'Because I have been hunting him and his team down for the past year,' Kazakov said. 'These commandos are Americans. I do not believe they are government operatives-I believe they are privately organized. They fund their organization by shaking down their targets for money or weapons.'
'How do you know so much about them?' Kazakov was about to tell him not to ask stupid questions, but Zuwayy came up with the answer by himself moments later: 'So you've encountered this group before, eh? Perhaps they are the reason you were captured and brought to trial in The Hague?'
'Zuwayy!'
'And perhaps this private organization got part of its funding from you, eh, tovarischT Zuwayy asked, laughing. 'On dal yimu pa pizde mishalkayt Did you get your ass handed to you by them? Now that I think about it, he did seem to know about you.'
'Listen to me, you ignorant goat-fucker,' Kazakov snarled, 'you can make fun of me all you want, but if we don't stop these commandos, they'll destroy all of us. You were lucky they just broke your nose and blew up your base-they could have just as easily carried you out of Libya and destroyed your whole fucking capital!'
'What are you going to do, Kazakov?'
'I am going to find those Americans,' Kazakov said, 'and I'm going to capture them somehow, I'll learn all the secrets about who they are and all the secrets about their weapons and technology-and then I'm going to roast each and every one of them on a spit in my living-room fireplace.' He paused for a long time, turning the few details he knew over and over and over again in his mind; then 'First your missile base at Samah is attacked by an obviously high-tech force; then, your armed residence at Jaghbub is attacked by an equally effective high-tech force. The commando asks that all the detainees from your attack out in the Mediterranean Sea be released. That means that the same commandos were involved in both the attack on Samah and Jaghbub-and that you probably had some of their comrades in custody.'
'Obviously. Na huya eta mn'e nuzhna? So what?'
'You idiot-you might have had the men that attacked your base,' Kazakov said. 'I want details, Zuwayy. I
